It is not easy to find Circassians in historical Circassia, a densely vegetated land of rolling hills and mountain slopes soaring to snowy heights along the northeastern coast of the Black Sea. The region of Greater Sochi used to be the homeland of the Circassian people before their expulsion by the Russian army in the 19th century. Modern Sochi has an ethnic make-up of staggering diversity; besides Russians, there are people from numerous other Caucasus nations, as well as Armenians, Georgians, Cossacks, Jews and Ukrainians.

But the people who resisted Russia’s expansion into the land of their fathers for some forty years are largely gone. The last Circassian forces surrendered to the Russian army in 1864 on a glade in the mountains above Sochi, later named Krasnaya Polyana. In a matter of weeks it will be the site where athletes compete for Olympic gold in the skiing events.

The highlanders’ defeat heralded a campaign of forced eviction on a massive scale. “Perhaps as many as 300,000 Circassians died from hunger, violence, drowning and disease when Russia expelled them from their lands,” writes journalist and author Oliver Bullough in his book about the Caucasus, “Let Our Fame Be Great”. Circassian groups have called for the killings to be recognized as genocide.

The majority of the Circassian nation was sent on ships to the Ottoman Empire. Only a scattering was allowed to stay in Russia on the condition that they relocate to the lowlands north of the mountains. Most Circassians live today beyond Russia’s borders, mainly in the Middle East, with smaller communities dotted across Europe and North America.

When Russia was awarded the right to host the 2014 Winter Games, an outcry went through many in the Circassian diaspora. They demanded the Games be moved unless Moscow apologized for the death of their ancestors. Some Circassians even compared the Sochi Games to hosting a sporting competition on the grounds of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. The closest that Russia has come to apologizing for the killings was in the 1990s, when former President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged that resistance to tsarist violence was justified.

In the streets of Sochi, an urban sprawl that snakes some 145 km (90 miles) along the coast, you are unlikely to hear the language of the indigenous people. Tkhagapsh, however, is one of the few settlements on this side of the mountains where Circassians are still in the majority. Nestling in the foothills some 85 km (83 miles) northwest of Sochi, the village is home to 180 inhabitants and boasts a small wooden mosque, a culture center and a memorial commemorating village ancestors who died at the hands of Russians and Soviets.

Tkhagapsh native Madin Chachukh, a retired Soviet Army officer turned Circassian folklore writer, keeps his mind on the challenges of the present instead of pondering the tragedies of the past. “Our biggest danger is that we forget our language,” he said over tea with cognac in the kitchen of the house where he grew up. “We wish the government gave us money to help us preserve our language and thereby our culture.”

His people will never forget the destruction of their nation, but one should accept the course of history, he said. “The Russians have done the same to us what American settlers have done to the Indians. That’s what empires do, they take all the resources and land they can. At the time it was considered normal.”

But Anzaur Alyal, 32, who is active in groups that strive to preserve Circassian culture, insists that Tkhagapsh remains, in a cultural sense, Circassian land.

“We tell tourists who come here: ‘Welcome to Agygea’ (the name Circassians use to describe their land). This upsets some patriotic Russian visitors. But we ask them to accept that they are standing on the soil of our fathers and forefathers, and they were not Russian. This is logical, isn’t it?”

Everyone in Russia knows this phrase, unintentionally coined by the late prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and applicable to an abundance of situations in this country, where official pronouncements of intent are often so far removed from reality that you could cry. Though instead of crying, Russians ruefully utter this aphorism and smile.

In Sochi you hear it often these days. With less than 100 days left before the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics, the city has entered the finishing straight to complete the venues for an extravaganza that is to showcase a new Russia. A Russia that has shed its shabby post-Soviet coat to welcome the world to Sochi, where the “sea meets the mountains”, where everything that is adorable about Russia will flourish in a sparkling new summer and winter holidaying resort, as official publicity has it.

This aspiration comes at a high cost.

There is of course the $50-billion prize tag, which makes the Sochi Olympics the most expensive Games in history. Some Russians say this money should have been spent on schools, roads or the public health system, all of which are in great need of repairs.

Others say Russia can and should afford it. After all, those dollars literally come flowing out of its oil-rich ground. And with President Vladimir Putin’s personal backing, the country will move heaven and earth to make sure everything will be completed in time.

The people of Sochi don’t have to look to national politics to form an opinion about the Games. Over the last four weeks I have travelled all over the area that stretches some 145 km (90 miles) along the Black Sea coast and spoken to many people from all walks of life. They included homeowners, builders, waiters, shop assistants, taxi drivers, ecologists, farmers – in short, locals who don’t have a financial stake in the Olympics.

Along with most Russians, they were gripped with enthusiasm back in 2007 when Sochi won the right to host the Games. They were hoping for better roads in their neigborhood, a functioning sewage system, a makeover of the Stalin-era beach and investment in the tourist sector that is a far cry from its Turkish competitor across the Black Sea.

Investors did come, but they have turned the resort town into an urban sprawl, with apartment high-rises springing up all over, massive hotel complexes, and super highways that criss-cross the city but offer few exits for locals to reach their homes.

For five years people here have been coping with cement dust, tossed up day and night by heavy construction machinery, they have watched their houses being demolished, their wells going dry and their streets groaning under perpetual traffic jams while the Olympic venues were being cut into the magnificent Caucasus Mountains.

Many people with grudges about the Games declined my request for a picture. This was not for fear of reprisals, but because they didn’t want to appear un-patriotic; just like everyone else in the country, they want their athletes to do well. And they are still proud that Russia will welcome the world for a festival of sports. They still want the Games to be a success.

But after everything they have been through, many Sochi locals have lost the nerve for even the faintest smile.

It was a sweltering hot day and already late in the afternoon when I reached the small Polish border town of Kostrzyn-nad-Odra, home to the Woodstock Station rock festival. As I made my way along a forest road towards a military base on its outskirts, I passed scores of bare-chested men who lay dotted around in the shade, having clearly succumbed to a mixture of heat and hard liqueur. I approached the throbbing roar of guitars beyond the forest with some apprehension, believing I was in for a night of testosterone-induced aggression. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

When I stepped out into the clearing I found myself at the edge of a mud mosh pit the size of a tennis court, with a few dozen boys and girls in swim suits going absolutely bonkers to the sound of a Polish punk band. Beyond it there was the main stage towering over a billowing cloud of dust thrown up by thousands of dancing metal-heads who were going equally off the rails.

Those in front of me chased one another through the knee-deep murky water, tipping each other over (girls were the preferred targets), and rolling around in the sludge in what looked like Mad Max fighting scenes. Every so often groups would be overcome by a communal fit of exercise mania and organize themselves in circles to do push-ups or crawl, military style, across the pit.

All right, I thought. This is not a moment to be a distant observer. I put one of my two cameras into my watertight rucksack (which I carried in anticipation of a summer thunderstorm) and stepped right in, braced with my wide-angle lens. The challenge was to keep the thing dry, which I managed more or less by holding it high up in the air. Only when I saw a possible picture did I dive into the mess, fire a few shots and lift it up again. A few people came up to me, telling me I was crazy. “Well, that’s a question of definition,” I replied.

Ten minutes later I was drenched and it was time to explore the rest of the festival ground. The level of craziness didn’t tail off, but the overall mood was very peaceful and surprisingly photographer friendly. No offence to my compatriots, but at German festivals people have the tendency to become overly pushy, if not aggressive, when alcohol and fun take their minds to ecstatic heights. But here my camera elicited only smiles and embraces.

The promise of a good time at one of Europe’s largest non-profit festivals must be the reason that some 100,000 Germans travel each year across the border to join their Polish neighbors for a weekend of rock, punk and reggae, contributing to the audience of hundreds of thousands that attended this year. I believe that over this weekend people from the two countries make more contact, spiritually and bodily, than any official German-Polish friendship program could ever achieve.

The festival is the brainchild of Polish journalist and social campaigner Jerzy Owsiak, who some say is the second most famous Pole after Pope John Paul II. He initiated the festival to say thank you to those who donated money to his GOCC charity organization for child medical care.

Entry to Woodstock Station is free of charge, all staff are volunteers and bands are merely paid expenses and a symbolic fee. Owsiak says he wants to keep the character of the festival non-commercial but is also clear about who runs the show: “I like democracy, but I am the boss. That’s why everything works,” he said in an interview with the German newspaper TAZ.

It was a sunny and calm Monday afternoon when I flew in a German army transport helicopter above a flooded region north of Magdeburg, the capital of the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt. The Elbe river had swollen to over seven meters (yards) above its normal levels and broken its banks and a dyke near the village of Fischbeck. Farmlands, forests and whole villages were inundated by its waters. Hundreds of people had to flee their homes.

Strapped to a bucket seat I sat beside the helicopter’s open sliding door and surveyed the water landscape below me: sunken buildings, tree tops and the tops of abandoned cars dotted the glistening, caramel-colored surface of the deluge. Here and there a street or a pristinely groomed hedge rose above the water as a reminder of the human order that had been submerged by the force of nature.

One week earlier I had waded through flooded villages upstream. Up to my waist in water I photographed the efforts of rescue teams and volunteers trying to contain the rising river and evacuate trapped inhabitants. When covering a natural disaster of this kind you have to be in the middle of it to capture the emotional dimension of the tragedy.

Yet a bird’s-eye view is equally as important. For only from above can you show the extend of a flood. Or as in the case of the picture below, by picking certain graphic details, bring the absurdity of the situation to the viewer’s attention. When the world in which we are ensconced so happily with all our man-made facilities becomes submerged by dirty water, everything assumes an unreal quality. When people’s homes turn into forlorn boxes surrounded by a freak lake that stretches to the horizon, you understand that the order we take for granted is a mere illusion in the face of nature’s caprices.

At some point the helicopter made a right turn, dipping the side I was sitting on deep below the horizon. And there it was right below me, the epitome of the absurd flood picture: the baby-blue oval of a swimming pool evenly surrounded by muddy water. I trained my 300mm lens straight down and composed as well as I could, which was a challenge in the soaring air stream that nearly snatched my camera out of my hands. I fired off some 10 frames before the chopper leveled out. The picture was gone. No one else on board had seen it.

“It feels good to walk in nature after so many months of boredom in the Immigration Holding Centre,” said Sallisou as we walked along a poplar-lined alley in the sleepy hinterland of Potsdam-Mittelmark, a rural county just outside the German capital of Berlin. Two weeks earlier, the smiling man from Niger had joined a 600 km (372 miles) foot march of refugees. With every county border they crossed, they were breaking a state order that restricts their movement to a territory around their camp. At present, Sallisou was eagerly filming the procession of refugees with a small video camera.

“Since I have been on this march, my days have a purpose again. There is so much to organize and we do it ourselves. We work as a team. Being on the move feels like I have a home again,” Salissou said.

For these people whose stories of displacement and rejection are as varied as the places they come from, ‘home’ means self-determination, the feeling of being needed and the knowledge that they are heading for some sort of reachable goal, all of which they have not had since they fled their countries.

The destination of the protest march is Berlin, where they want to set up a tent camp and tell the German public what it is like to live as an unwanted person with nowhere to go in a country that is free for everyone else.

They say that they have had enough of the humiliation, the languor and the uncertainty in the refugee camps. There’s nothing to fill the empty days in the barren corridors of their overcrowded camps, often former army barracks – no access to education, no regular work, only countless cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and the ever present fear of deportation, they say.

“The injustice we endure is no longer acceptable. It makes us sick. We are on strike,” said Salomon Wantchoucou from Benin. “We are young and talented people, but we have no perspective. We are excluded from society. Enough is enough!” he said after medics treated the open wounds on his feet just before bedtime in an overnight accommodation. “This march is tough on my feet. One hundred kilograms weighing down on them for weeks, from morning to night!” He makes a crunching gesture and laughs with a mixture of sarcasm and frustration.

“How are your feet?” I ask the next day as he pushes his heavy frame with an obvious limp along a forest foot path.“They hurt,” he replies curtly. “But for freedom we must continue!”

Their journey took them through forests, fields and villages of rural Germany where the large group of foreigners provided a baffling sight to locals. But apart from the odd hostile comment and occasional rallies from right-wing groups, the refugees were afforded plenty of support from civil rights groups, organizing accommodation and providing food, the organizers said. When they set up a tent camp in Berlin’s central Kreuzberg district, the number of protesters had increased to about 80 refugees who had left their camps all over Germany to join the strike.

Camp life was governed by their efforts to make their makeshift home as hospitable as possible in the increasingly inclement autumn weather. When they were not building tents and moving around mattresses, they held countless meetings that lasted for several hours. What was the long-term strategy? What would happen after the big rally to parliament? No one had a clear answer, other than voicing the determination to fight.

“We stay until our demands are met,” said Hamid Reza Moradi, an electrical engineer from Iran and one of the refugee organizers. “We have no fear. We are so many, they cannot ignore us. Besides, we have nowhere else to go. There is a Persian saying, ‘There is no color that is darker than black.’ This is where I am at this point in my life. I have nothing to lose.”

The Bundestag in Berlin, session 188. The plenum below the grand glass dome of the Reichstag building is buzzing with the voices of lawmakers who are to vote today on the ratification of Europe’s permanent bailout mechanism.

News photographers pluck the occasional picture from among the crowd with a timid click of their cameras. But everyone is waiting for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A summit of EU leaders in Brussels has finished only hours earlier. A summit that Ms Merkel left as the defeated, after Spain and Italy cornered her into budging to their demand to use EU rescue fund money for the direct recapitalisation of banks, something that thus far had been a red rag for Germany.

How would Ms Merkel sell the outcome of the summit to the house? Curiosity is running high on the two tightly packed media balconies overlooking the floor. TV cameras and batteries of photographers’ super-tele lenses are trained at the spot where Angela Merkel will appear any minute.

Then she emerges from the back corridor, dressed in a brightly colored blazer, her gait determined, heading straight for the company of a party fellow. A cacophony of rattling camera shutters accompanies her every step. Their hysteric sound of high-tech metal slapping against metal flutters from the press balcony across the entire plenum and cannot escape the attention of the person down below who is being captured in this moment. But Angela Merkel is too much of a professional to allow her composure to slip.

She is quickly surrounded by financial experts of her coalition. Where there is space, photographers move their position to get a clear view.

Ever since the European sovereign-debt crisis has deteriorated into something that threatens the common currency and indeed the union itself, Germany as the European lynchpin economy has been at the center of most newspapers stories. And Angela Merkel, setting Germany’s agenda, has no choice but to lend her face to the visual side of the media coverage.

When Angela Merkel doesn’t like someone, she will show it. She becomes frosty. She is often frosty when she faces us, the eagle-eyed news photographers. To be fair, I can understand that she is somewhat weary of our ubiquity. At all of her public events we are there in the first row, shuffling for a good spot. And we are not there to give her flowers. We scrutinize her every movement and investigate the surface of her face for signs that reveal something meaningful in the light of the day’s installment of the EU story. A twist of the lips, a wave of the hand, a smile or just an empty stare – the tiniest detail can make the picture appear in the world’s newspapers the next morning.

Details are the key. This fact is not lost on Ms Merkel. So she gives us as little as possible unless she wants a certain picture to emerge. On a bad day, showing the open palm of her left hand alternating with showing the open palm of her right hand, can be all we get in the way of gestures. And of course, there is always the famous triangle hand gesture at the center of her body that is her home position and makes for the most boring picture.

No, Angela Merkel is not a natural talent in front of the camera. Her level-headed style in politics is reflected in the way she moves in public. She displays no emotional spikes, unless she watches Germany play soccer.

For news photographers working in Berlin, where during busy weeks photographing Angela Merkel can make up some 60 percent of all assignments, this means an exercise in the utmost in patience and inventiveness. Patience, because it can take half of her speech before she grants us a meager hand movement. Inventiveness, because after you photographed her yesterday in front of the blue wall at the Chancellery, you have to photograph her today in front of the blue wall at the Chancellery. But differently, because the story has moved on.

Yes, I admit, there are moments when I am as tired of seeing her as she must be tired of seeing us. But we are stuck with each other, for in today’s world no political event can go without a picture. For a good reason: there are certain notions of a story that are best disclosed by a news photograph. Despite the painstaking choreography of, say, a state visit, there are always moments when traces of the energy that exists between the protagonists peek through the cracks of the protocol. A good picture will record and release this energy upon publication.

The secret of “Merkelography” is photographing through those cracks. And somewhere in the vast stream of pictures of Angela Merkel and her fellow European leaders that we produce every day there is a pattern, a certain mood, perhaps only a handful of photographs that will determine the image of our day and age in the history books of the future. Whether this image will be positive or negative, depends on the actions taken by those politicians today.

Over the last decade Berlin has been changing more rapidly than most of its inhabitants can stomach. Because of its history, the brunt of gentrification that changes everything (from social fabric to architecture) has hit the German capital more than other cities around the world.

Before the Wall came down, Berlin used to be a mecca for bohemians, artists, left-wing idealists and military service dodgers, mostly from West Germany. The collapse of East Germany resulted in an abundance of neglected buildings available in East Berlin. Punks and artists flocked in and the city became Europe’s capital of squats. A maelstrom of unfettered subculture productivity ensued, bestowing the city with an aura of the urban cool that feeds into its reputation to the present day.

But the Berlin of the wild nineties is long gone. Most of the squatters have been evicted or their housing projects legalized. Some of those whom back then ran underground clubs are well-off nightlife entrepreneurs today. Ordinary people who shared their neighborhood with the artists have had to move away, because rents have gone up manifold. And the influx of bohemians from abroad has turned into a stampede of party tourists, turning the last subculture enclaves into playgrounds for reckless twenty-somethings.

The Tacheles art center mirrors the evolution of Berlin’s underground culture in many ways. It started as an art squat in a run-down eastern working class district and quickly became an international icon. But the fall of the Wall also meant that its neighborhood, the Mitte district, moved from the edge of East Berlin into the very center of the unified capital. Mitte became the focus of a real estate development boom and with it came the media types and those who could afford to live in Class A property. Amidst the fancy bars and boutiques that sprang up everywhere, the gritty, graffiti-adorned Tacheles building became a major tourist attraction.

How to handle such a situation? Fight it or go along with it? This question (and scores of internal issues) split the Tacheles community into two factions. But for many years a tenancy agreement with the developer allowed the two camps to live alongside each other, with the up-stairs group pursuing a non-profit approach to art and the downstairs group combining art and commerce.

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But the tenancy agreement has since expired and the building is now up for sale. When someone offered the downstairs group one million euro if they left, they took the money and vacated their part of the property. A betrayal? “No”, they say. If someone gives them money to buy their own building where they can realize their ideas, then that suits them just fine.

The upstairs group says it will stay and fight what increasingly looks like a losing battle. The city is notoriously broke and will not be able to bail them out. And while Mayor Klaus Wowereit says he is generally in favor of fringe culture – he famously coined the phrase that “Berlin is poor but sexy” – he also stressed that not every piece of fallow land that was created as a result of World War II and Berlin’s division could be preserved forever. In the end it’s big money that decides the game, as it has for many alternative culture projects before Tacheles.

<img src="http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/files/2010/07/loveparade9.jpg" alt="A rucksack is seen at the site where a stampede killed some 21 people during a festival in Duisburg July 24, 2010. REUTERS/Thomas Peter " title="A rucksack is seen at the site where a stampede killed some 21 people during a festival in Duisburg July 24, 2010. REUTERS/Thomas Peter " width="600" height="400" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-16769"

When I arrived at the scene there was no crowd, no screams, just this dark tunnel. A grimy concrete tube about the length of two soccer pitches and the width of a two-lane country road. It felt cramped and haunting even when it stood empty.

But it was not empty.

Broken bottles, ripped off rucksacks, torn-off shoes, a sleeping bag, medical gloves and thermo-blankets bore witness to the tragedy that had occurred here a couple of hours earlier. Young men in light-blue t-shirts of the security firm that was hired to look after the safety of the guests loitered at the rear of the tunnel, their faces gray from disbelief.

The throbbing base of the techno music that came down from the festival above reminded us why those, whose journey ended here, had come: to take part in what was to be the world’s biggest party. Every so often, when the base line heightened to a frenzy, elated yells of dancing revelers pierced the night. For them the party went on.

By this point the medics and emergency cars had left and taken with them hundreds of injured revelers. They had survived the stampede. Others did not. Their bodies lay behind meshed wire fences covered with blue tarpaulins to shield the scene from inquisitive eyes. More people died in hospital. By Wednesday the death toll stood at 21.

We picked up pictures from local photographers that showed the revelers’ desperate attempts to escape from the crush and the subsequent rescue efforts. Yes, these pictures were of graphic nature. But that’s what you need to show the extent of the disaster.

Yet, our task was to cover the aftermath.

Aftermath photography is evocative and subtle. Through pictures of objects or people that are imbued with the dew of a bygone tragedy, it reflects the horror of disaster without showing the gore. There are images of people laying flowers and lighting candles, which usually happens the following day. They come to show empathy with the victims or turn up out of curiosity. A scene of tragedy has an attraction many cannot resist. But there are also those who return to ponder on the horror they have been through.

Early on Sunday I met Heiko Hammer, a 38-year-old who sported the hallmarks of a typical Love Parade reveler: mirrored shades, bright red trainers and a combat-style jacket. He was trapped in the crowd at the rear of the tunnel when the panic broke out. “I will never forget the face of the people who managed to escape. They looked as if they had just come from war,” he said. “People who go to the Love Parade are like birds of paradise. If you trap them, they die. Why were there all those fences?” he asked.

Early on Sunday the police allowed us to enter the area behind the blue tarpaulin at the foot of a staircase, where many people tried to escape from the crowd crush. This was where most of the deaths occurred. My colleague Wolfgang Rattay had arrived there first. I met him at the exit of the small enclosure and he asked me to stay on to see what other images I could make. Wolfgang had taken the picture that was arguably the most emblematic image of this story: the outlines of bodies, painted with white paint on the pavement that was littered with the debris of the disaster. Hundreds of crushed bottles, personal belongings and disposable first aid kits.

A short rainstorm that morning had turned the dusty ground into slush.

The scene was too chaotic to extract meaningful overview pictures other than the ones Wolfgang had already taken. So I scanned the ground as I was curious to find out what distinguished this ostensible pile of rubbish from an ordinary pile of rubbish. I did not have to look hard. Sunglasses. I found dozens of mangled sunglasses. Red ones, yellow ones, pink ones. Some were heart-shaped, others had blades instead of glasses. They were cheap models, those that people wear to have fun, not to protect themselves from the sun. Each one had belonged to someone, for whom this party had turned into a nightmare. I found them driven into the ground by hundreds of feet, next to rubber gloves, a ripped-off belt buckle and trash. I took a picture of every one I could find. That was the best I could do to tell this sad story.